214 REPORT OX THE FORESTS OF INDIA. 



grant of the revenues of a given village or villages, but the resump- 

 tion of jagheers was coninion. The zemindars and all other 

 classes of middlemen were either direct agents of the State for the 

 collection of its revenues, or responsible contractors, to whom the 

 revenues were farmed out for a fixed sum ; but under these 

 middlemen we find evidences of a state of things which indicates 

 the position of serf as the true status of the cultivator. Nothing 

 was more common than for the cultivator, when suffering from 

 oppression, or under the annoyance of some grievance, real or 

 imagined, to threaten to leave his land ; and we have abundant 

 evidence that where this threat was carried into execution the 

 middleman was generally successful in moving the Crown to have 

 him brought back. Practically, then, the cultivator would 

 appear to have been rather the object of proprietary rights than 

 himself a proprietor ; and we cannot correctly estimate the 

 position of the ryot of to-day in comparison with the ryot of fifty 

 years ago, without bearing in mind that the change is a natural 

 consequence of the great social revolution which British rule has 

 inaugurated in India. For ages before the advent of British rule 

 the population was stationary in point of numbers, and as a con- 

 sequence unoccupied land was valueless. Now population, apart 

 from periodical drawbacks, such as the present famine in Southern 

 India, is advancing numerically in nearly the English ratio ; land 

 is in demand, and has acquired a value per se, and the inalien- 

 ability of the cultivator from the land, which under the old con- 

 ditions made him a serf, required only to be enunciated under the 

 new conditions to render him a proprietor. The Indian Govern- 

 ment has laid down the law, that the cultivator cannot be ousted 

 as long as he pays his rent, and in consequence he is co-proprietor 

 in his holding to the extent of the difference between its market 

 value and the capital value of his rent. The zemindar or middle- 

 man has become a co-proprietor to the extent of the difference in 

 value between the Government assessment and the rents realised, 

 and under the permanent settlement of Bengal his status is that 

 of sole proprietor, with limited power in the matters of raising 

 rents or ousting tenants. The State, except in Bengal, retains 

 also one of the most important evidences of proprietary right over 

 the land, "V*iz., the power to raise the assessment at discretion at 

 the lapse of each period of settlement, usually thirty years. 



Since the establishment of British rule the cultivator, as from 

 time immemorial, has had an interest in the forests and waste 



